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When people hear the word hacking they often think of the bad kind – cybercriminals breaking into systems and stealing information for their own profit. However, the skill of hacking is also used by businesses and law enforcement to probe for vulnerabilities in their cybersecurity defenses. This is known as white hat hacking and it can help businesses close security gaps before they are exploited by black hat hackers.

Vulnerabilities exist in hardware, software and the human element of a business, organization or network. Hackers can use software to scan for such weaknesses or find them manually using a variety of tools and techniques. One popular tool is a packet sniffer, which captures data in transit over a network. Another is spoofing, in which one system or website masquerades as another to fool programs, systems and users into divulging information.

In the early 1980s, personal computers became more widely available to the public, which led to an increase in hacking activities. Hackers of this era were often obsessed with finding low-tech ways to get around the secure telecommunication networks and expensive long-distance phone charges of their time. They were called phreaks, and their activity was known as phreaking.

As the popularity of hacking grew, it began to be associated with malicious intentions, such as pirating software and stealing private information from networks. A gang of teenagers, who were called the 414s, was caught hacking into computer systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Security Pacific Bank and Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. This sparked national concern and a Newsweek article that was largely the first to use the term hacker in the pejorative sense.